All that and no improvement to battery life. I've been wearing an Apple Watch for a few years, the data collection is good but the abysmal battery life and associated charge management is a real downer. I'm Apple ecosystem for almost everything but the battery and touch sensitivity issues are enough to get me to do the work to go to a different platform for health data.
I don't understand features like sleep apnea monitoring on a device with an "all-day, 18-hour battery life," unless they're expecting people to get one watch for the day and another one for the night.
I wear my Apple Watch all the time, even when I'm sleeping. I pretty much just charge it when I'm in the shower or getting ready in the morning. It charges super fast, and I've found that having a regular charging routine is actually better for these gadgets.
Funny enough, watches with longer battery life can mess up your charging habits. I had this problem with my old Pebble watch. Yeah, the battery lasted longer, but I'd forget to charge it and end up with a dead watch more often than I do with my Apple Watch.
Now, I just pop it on the charger every morning, and I'm good to go. No more worrying about it dying on me out of nowhere.
every single Apple feature or change creates this kind of weird negative-metric-reinforcement no matter the product whenever the number slides backwards or keeps parity
Battery doesn't last long? Well, let's forget that the entire market has trended towards catering to a customer desire for long-life batteries -- it's a feature to help coordinate 'charging habits'!... whatever that is.
Less keyboard space and battery life? No worries because that touch-bar is going to increase productivity so many more times than without it!
"No user replaceable battery? Of course not -- those are dangerous!"
which eventually devolves into :
"Well, my reception is terrible, but I was holding it wrong "
It's not really a grievance of mine, it's more like an utter amazement that somehow Apple and Tesla are the only companies that seem to be able to foster that kind of behavior in their fans.
The price points of both groups make me think it's sort of an advanced 'buyer's remorse' , but I don't know.
Worst / funniest case of this (if you have a grim sense of humor) is when early unibody macbook pros would get 70C or so to the touch and physically burn the users to the point of minor scarring. People who’d complain about this would be berated by apple defenders stating that “its not a laptop and apple never called it a laptop. yet at the time a simple search for “laptop site:apple.com” sure seemed to indicate that they are referred to as laptops by apple.
Every tool has a correct way to be used. You can’t tell me I shouldn’t slide my electric toothbrush from side to side “because of market forces”.
Battery technology just isn’t there. Bigger battery means heavier device. Duracell made a smartphone with a huge-ass multiday battery… that the market did not ask for. It has to be a compromise unfortunately.
As for the Touch Bar I don’t really understand the hate for it. The execution was subpar but I miss its ability to autofill forms just like on the iPhone and generally using the autocomplete UI the same way. There’s no replacement now.
As for the batteries, I hope they’re eventually forced to fold on that issue, but it will come at the expense of design, size and weight. Again a compromise.
No I still don’t understand the Apple Watch battery issue.
I have a xaiomi mi band 9. The body to screen ratio is roughly the same as the Apple Watch. It does HR tracking, workouts, has excellent 1000 night brightness, weather, notifications etc. I get about 15 days from a charge. They say I can get 21. But either way. I understand the Apple Watch is running better hardware and more things in the background, but there’s also significantly more space in the watch for battery. It might be doing more but a factor of 15x is a crazy differential.
Comparing Apple Watch to Mi Band makes no sense. Apple Watch is more of a microcomputer than a cheap smart band. It would be better to compare it to something like Garmin Fenix 7X that lasts you almost 40 days with 120 hours in GPS mode and does much more than a Mi Band.
It's miniaturized iPhone as it can be used without phone to make calls, receive messages, stream music etc. as it has e-SIM capabilities. It runs Game Boy Color games which is pretty cool even if not very useful.
Mi bands are low powered, low-feature and fairly miserable experiences if you interact much with the screen. They are great at no-effort tracking of fitness metrics and providing basic information.
Apple Watches are designed for much more interaction and variety of capability.
It can be hard to understand this if you haven’t used an Apple Watch.
You’re misinformed about the space for substantial additional battery. Look at any teardown to see the compact component fitting.
Your mi band is a great device; just be realistic about the tradeoffs. Other devices don’t have to suck for yours to be good.
> As for the Touch Bar I don’t really understand the hate for it
You don't understand why people wouldn't like something that takes away what they used regularly (function keys) and gave them something that necessitated looking away from their screen in order to even use and provided extremely limited use cases?
Exactly--GP's preference for a watch with a longer battery life and user-replaceable battery is at direct odds with the desire for a thinner watch. Presumably Apple has just done the math and decided the market is better for the latter? It's always been a bit chunky for a watch--maybe now it can finally approach "normal" watch size.
I think it's more interesting that Apple creates this reaction where people will endlessly harp on about things that happened over a decade ago under different leadership (holding it wrong) any time they update their products.
It’s even worse than that. Those words were never uttered. People have interpreted their own sentiment from what was actually said and now that phrase is repeated as it if it was.
This is a bit hyperbolic. They take occasional risks like the touchbar and then they addressed it after bad feedback. I personally like their aggressive sense of design mission and not always playing it safe merely because it will cause flame wars on technology forums. Yet generally they keep the UX extremely clean and consistent through major versions.
Their mission with watch clearly isn't a multiday battery thing, it's a compromise for high quality displays and performance. The market exists for alternatives. The lack of good ones would be on them not just Apple.
In my decade plus experience those bad examples like touchbar are few and far in between.
When you notice your Garmin is under 10% it still means full day or enough battery to track 2-3h activity and still have some battery left. I'm surprised Apple watch battery is still - more or less the worst in the industry. Even if we forget about Garmin, comparable Samsung watches are multiday devices.
Garmin is great, but it is a fitness sports watch first and less of a smart watch. Once Garmin can have apps like overcast and omnifocus on them I will think of them as being in the some category as the apple watch.
Garmin has apps like Overcast. There are multiple music services built in like Spotify and YouTube that support podcasts. And there are additional third-party podcast apps on the Connect IQ store.
A personal habit thing perhaps? My Pebble Time is still going strong but I religiously charge it every couple days (around 60%)... as you mentioned, while I showered. Before the most recent battery change I was down to about 48 hours on a charge. I do love taking weekend camping trips and not needing to take a charger.
I have tried a couple other smart watches but I keep going back to my Pebble as it does all I care about. Until they can get to a solid 4-5 days of life (or Rebble stops working) I don't know that I'll be too tempted to replace it permanently. The Garmin line is interesting though.
Time Steel here n exactly the same boat as you. How the world upgraded to a worse battery experience is beyond me. All I want is a watch that tells the time for days and it's nice to have smart features.
I used to use the Pebble, then the AmazFit Bip (with something like 40 days battery life) after that — finally only switching to an Apple Watch when Series 5 came with an always-on display.
Apart from telling time, I like how it tracks my steps and sleep, and can send music to my earphones so I don't have to bring my phone out for a run. I also like being able to use the watch as a camera viewfinder/remote.
One huge plus of the Apple ecosystem is the sheer number of watch straps I get to choose from, which lets me dress up the watch if I have to. And to top it all off, I get a nice screen.
I wouldn't have made the switch if the battery life was incompatible with my lifestyle, but so far, so good.
I know the Apple Watch is water resistant, but that doesn’t necessarily include the effect of soaps and detergents. Be careful with those, even if your gear is rated for the water itself.
That would be a very nice excuse to upgrade since I've been waiting for my S3 to kick the bucket for years. It's very scuffed, and have been wearing it to the shower since it was new, and even taken it river rafting.
Yet somehow it's reporting 90% battery capacity. I might finally upgrade anyway, since it's the only device holding me back from enabling advanced data protection on iCloud.
I used to do the same thing, but the UX was never great. I've now bought five of these cheap waterproof bluetooth speaker that has play/pause/skip controls on it, and it was a life changer. I keep one in my suitcase for travelling, one in each bathroom, and have a couple paired in stereo that I keep in my office. It sounds amazingly good for the size and price of the speaker. Some of the best $20 I've spent. Brand is "Notabrick": https://www.amazon.com/NOTABRICK-Bluetooth-Speakers-Portable...
I went the other way around haha. I used to have a cheap waterproof bluetooth speaker, but upgraded to a much better wall-powered speaker. Ikea sells white-labeled speakers made by Sonos, called ENEBY [1]. Their dual-woofer speaker was amazing for the price, on-par with something like a full size Homepod, for $90!
Unfortunately Ikea discontinued their larger version, and now sell Sonos/Ikea co-branded speakers instead with less drivers, and more money. They sound good, but not as good as their older, larger predecessors.
Thank you! Did you bail from the small speaker because of sound quality?
Do you use your watch to control the Bluetooth playback? If so, When controlling it in the shower, do you find that the touch screen has a hard time sometimes registering your touch, or having it accurately sense?
I like that you like it, but as a minor PSA many people who care about the environment might not realise that a really long shower is probably one of the easiest wins in terms of carbon reduction they can make.
I really enjoyed showing in my last place because we had solar hot water
heating, but I’m always mindful of just how much energy it takes to heat water.
We used to wind our watches in the morning. I think that could be Apple’s thinking. Your positive experience with a daily routine reenforces that idea to me.
Yes, once it was technically possible. I think interesting idea is from a Human Factors perspective. I contend from human factors perspective using 24ish hours is good technical limit. Most humans operate on a 24 hour cycle so keeping devices on that cycle has a certain simplicity. It is easy to communicate and shares a historic limit with its mechanical ancestors.
This could also help in keeping the battery size in check. The engineering of all aspects should be balanced.
During the night, my wireless charger base on my nightstand charges my iPhone. When I get up in the morning I take my iPhone and put my Kindle on it during the day.
I use a Pixel Watch 2, not an Apple watch, but my charging behavior is pretty much as you describe. It goes on to charge during my morning loop, and is always full by the time I'm ready to head out the door. It's good enough that I don't have to think about the charge state at all through the day, it'll last regardless of usage, and that's all I need.
You are literally trying to show an enormous flaw of an otherwise amazing watch as a something positive which makes no sense to me. My Garmin also charges fast but lasts almost 3 weeks and I just plug it in when it tells me it needs to be plugged in and I don't need a "charging routine" for that.
I know what you are talking about with longer battery life :)
I have a "dumbphone" with a battery that lasts 1 to 2 weeks depending on use, it's such a surprise when the battery goes that I'm often stuck without it being charged.
Charging your wearable device shouldn't require "habits". If they do then the device is defective by design. Competing watches from Garmin don't seem to have this design flaw.
Late to the party, but the first thing that comes to my mind is an LTE radio. Yeah, there’s the Garmin 945LTE, but that is probably the worst Garmin purchase I’ve made ($12/month, can’t reply to texts, and it will burn through battery faster than an Apple Watch if it can’t find a cell tower).
How often do you track exercise with it? That watch looks like it doesn't actually run anything on it except a heart rate monitor and is just a passive bluetooth enabled notification display so that would definitely explain the difference in power usage.
Yes, for sure it does much less. It just has basic health monitoring, steps, heartbeat, sleep. I have the continuous heartbeat monitoring off, and turn it on for workouts 3-4 times a week. It will show messages, email, or other app notifications. For me that's most of what I want from a smartwatch, and I'm willing to trade the more advanced features for the battery life.
Chinese naming can be pretty interesting. Probably would pay for itself to hire some native English speaking naming consultants. I've got my Bip on a Niziruoup rubber strap..
I don't mind charging my watch daily when I go to my desk to do e-mail, I just want the watch to be handle skipping that for a few days due to travel or a weekend or whatever.
I mean it's literally a few minutes on a charger to go from 5% battery to 60%. Would it be more convenient if it went longer? Sure, but as it stands, if you carry a watch charger in your bag, like... even the most minuscule time on a USB port will have it ready to roll.
I've got an SE at current (had a 4 before it finally keeled over, and this one has essentially identical features and was readily available) and I just don't get the battery griping. Mine only uses a scant 70% ish of it's available capacity. I wear it every day while sleeping and to/from work, then come home and toss it on the charger till bed time.
I have a handful of watch chargers including one at my desk and one in my laptop bag. A full day of kid activities and work around the house doesn't really see either of those though. Do I detour to top up the watch a couple times a day? Yes. Does my watch run out of juice some days? Also yes. Would a Fitbit or Garmin have this problem? No. It's a bit of a slog moving my health data out of Apple's ecosystem which is why I haven't done it yet.
Yep, just work in short frequent charges during downtime like that. I was worried about being annoyed by the charging too but in reality it’s not been a problem at all
I don't think a Garmin watch and an Apple Watch are truly comparable. The Garmin is primarily a fitness watch, while the Apple Watch is a smartwatch. When a Garmin can run apps like OmniFocus, Overcast, a Mastodon client, an Instagram client, and even join a Zoom call, then I'll consider it a smartwatch.
Everyone has their own list of needs for a smartwatch though. Mine are always on display, steps and heartrate tracking, and notifications. I can't imagine ever caring about running any of the apps you listed on a watch, and I don't think I'm in the minority.
Their comment isn't wrong though, I had the same experience with Pebble. It wasn't part of my daily routine, so I would forget to charge it. With my Apple Watch I don't.
That being said, the Apple Watch has issues of its own, like sometimes draining substantially faster for (as far as I can tell) absolutely no reason. Rebooting the watch and phone has sorted that out for me, and it's only happened a couple of times, but it's not a good problem to have on a device where you may need the whole battery to get through a day.
> It wasn't part of my daily routine, so I would forget to charge it.
So maybe the problem is your daily routine, not the fact that the battery life is objectively better?
It's like if you bought a laptop with too little RAM, and you try to explain that its actually an advantage because it forces you to run less applications. It's absurd to the max.
But aside from the times when I've had bug-induced battery drain, I never run out of battery and it's not something I worry about. So I also don't really care about the battery life being shorter than my Pebble's was.
Apple could triple the battery life to 3 days, but as you've just pointed out it should still be part of my daily routine to charge it, and if I'm not charging it every day to make sure it's a habit this is a "problem" with my daily routine (your words).
So supposing the battery gets better, and I fix my problematic routine and make sure to charge it every day, now the extra 2 days of battery life are literally pointless. So I can see why Apple has prioritized thinness over a larger battery.
Your personal preference when it comes to not caring about battery life doesn't change the fact that Apple watch battery life is amongst the worst on the market.
Just like if you don't care that your laptop has only 2GB RAM - that doesn't mean it's a good amount of RAM or some kind of advantage over 32GB of RAM.
Explaining away objective deficiencies with personal preferences and anecdotes is not at all convincing or useful.
If a laptop with 2 GB of RAM met my needs and I was happy with it, would you get in an argument with me about how actually my laptop is deficient because other laptops have bigger RAM numbers on their spec sheet, even if my RAM usage never exceeds 2 GB?
I think we’ll just have to agree to disagree on how important battery life is. To me, improvements beyond “one day including some time with the GPS and heart rate sensors running” aren’t worth anything.
I’d much rather they keep making it thinner, because compared to the Pebble Time its biggest deficiency is still how chunky it is.
But of course your preferences may differ, and as you noted there are other smart watches on the market with longer battery life. I’m certainly not stopping you from using one of those instead if your preference is to prioritize long battery life.
> If a laptop with 2 GB of RAM met my needs and I was happy with it, would you get in an argument with me about how actually my laptop is deficient because other laptops have bigger RAM numbers on their spec sheet, even if my RAM usage never exceeds 2 GB?
If you tried to make an argument that having the 2GB RAM is an advantage I would challenge you on that. Yes.
> I think we’ll just have to agree to disagree on how important battery life is.
I didn't say anything about how important battery life is, and I don't really care. My issue is not with the battery life, but with the absurd reasoning and mental gymnastics you guys are doing to literally try and pretend an objective deficiency is an advantage.
Does it have the worst battery life on the market when comparing like to like?
Garmin isn't like to like since it's not really a smart watch it's an exercise tracker. What are android watches like for battery life that would be a better comparison.
Yes it does, and I can give you many examples. However, the following thing you said tells me that having a rational conversation with you is unlikely:
> Garmin isn't like to like since it's not really a smart watch it's an exercise tracker.
And like people who complain that apples laptops are too expensive you'll be bringing out examples with far fewer features, slower processors, worse displays and battery lives that only exist when the user doesn't track or run anything I'm guessing.
If you think Garmin watches are at all comparable to apple watches while still maintaining those long battery lives you've never used a Garmin watch for anything.
So many vacuous claims about supposed missing features, worse displays, worse battery life... and yet the only hard evidence/example in this entire comment chain is the horrible battery life of the apple watch...
> Because all of those things impact battery life.
Oh 'all' of those zero specific things you mentioned impact battery life? Ok.
Anyway, I don't even care what the battery life is - my initial comment in this chain is replying to a guy who didn't mention any of these elusive (apparently taboo to name) missing features - they literally just tried to argue that lower batter life is an advantage because they can't keep a routine otherwise. Pointing out how absurd this reasoning is seems to trigger a bunch of other apple fanboys, which is just hilarious tbh.
Processing power, screen size and quality, active monitoring quality, AOD. There are a few things that will hugely impact battery life.
Lower battery life literally doesn't matter if you can charge it in the time it takes you to get ready in the morning. It has zero impact on usability.
The maximum battery lives advertised on sites are literally for doing nothing anyhow. My Garmin definitely does not have a multi day charge when I'm using it to track swimming.
You are doing the tech equivalent to her knees are too pointy.
Sorry, I was actually asking what your critique of their comment was, specifically. Someone else offered a great critique of the product; someone else followed up saying they don't feel it's an issue; and then you came in throwing the word fanboy around with little critical thinking applied, and now you're using the original person's critique as though it's your own.
I wear my watch all day and night, charge it for 30mim while I sip coffee.
I don’t get the issues people have around battery life. Mine is on me almost 24 hours a day and a daily charge. Two watches seems dramatic for a single 30m charge a day.
Edit: note on charge, it’s probably more, but it’s just while I sip my coffee. I never pay attention to it despite the claims of battery life woes.
Series 7 here. I do <= 30 minutes a day twice -- usually closer to 20 minutes at a time, on the Apple Watch fast charger plugged into an Apple 20W power adapter. Otherwise, I wear the Watch 23.25-ish/7 and never run out of battery.
I was in the same boat, but the 30 minute fast charging now makes me think that this actually might work. Sleep with it on, wake up, pop it on the charger while you get ready, bam basically a full charge by the time you leave the house.
I don't wear an Apple watch at night (and I don't plan to upgrade to this one) but for the first time I think I could see how this might work for someone.
Is this not a decline in performance? I have the Watch 8 and I'm pretty sure it lasts slightly over 24 hours. 18 hours means that if you put it on the charger daily for 1 hour then you have to shift the time at which you charge it 5 hours earlier every day.
Even if it was just 24 hours that's not good enough. Let's say you religiuosly charge it immediately after arriving home from work, at 6PM. Then one day you go out to dinner and grab some drinks and stay out until 11. It'll have been 28 hours since you grabbed it off the charger the previous day so you won't have use of your watch that evening.
'Similar' is doing a lot of heavy lifting here. Competing products with that kind of battery life offer far fewer features and lack the app ecosystem of the Apple Watch. That might work for some, but it's a dealbreaker for me. As a runner, a Garmin might seem like the perfect choice, but it lacks many features I've come to rely on with the Apple Watch.
Which features specifically? There are a lot of features that are built in to Garmin devices so they generally have less need of additional apps. But there is a rich ecosystem of apps as well.
One feature is heart rate and sleep tracking accuracy.
The Quantified Scientist on Youtube has ever-updated charts in pretty much any of his videos that investigate the accuracy of a given health tracker wearable.
Check out the chapter titles with "Comparison w/ other watches" to see charts for heart rate accuracy and sleep accuracy across different product lines. Apple Watch is best in class (e.g. 99% convergence with Polar chest strap).
Yes, that seems to be consistent with the test results from DC Rainmaker. The Apple optical HR sensor is marginally better than Garmin in a few limited scenarios. So a win for Apple there and very technically impressive, although the difference would only tend to show up intermittently during certain intense activities. Serious athletes who really care about accurate heart rate will usually use a separate chest sensor as there are inherent limits to what an optical wrist sensor can do, especially if the wearer's skin is darker or tattooed or dirty.
Kind of grasping at straws to require 99.99% accuracy. At that point a Polar chest strap is better. Olympians use Garmin watches all the time and the heart tracking is pretty great in most of their more expensive watches.
Well, there's also sleep time accuracy and sleep stage accuracy. What about those?
And the whole point is that you don't need to wear a Polar chest strap and a bunch of sleep lab electrodes to get good results. We're talking about something you get to wear on your wrist that takes calls and does all sorts of things.
The apps I use aren't available on Garmin, like Overcast for podcasts. I haven’t found an email client, which I use every morning, and I doubt any of the available options would sync properly with my email services. I rely on OmniFocus for GTD, but it isn’t supported by Garmin; at best, you can get to-do notifications sent to the watch, which isn’t what I need. Zoom doesn't seem to be supported either, and I occasionally join meetings from my watch when I'm just listening in.
There also don’t appear to be any Mastodon or Instagram apps, or at least none that I've noticed. My recipe manager has a watch app that guides me through the steps, provides ingredient lists, and sets timers at each stage — nothing like that exists for Garmin. My strength training app includes demonstration videos on the watch, which I don't see on Garmin. My diet tracking app isn't supported, and I haven’t found anything comparable. Adding things like an Amtrak ticket to a Garmin seems complicated, and I've read mixed reports about how well it scans QR codes.
Overall, while Garmin excels at fitness tracking, it lacks many of the features and apps I've come to depend on.
I don’t care about random generic podcast apps, I want the podcast app that I use. Also the strength training animations are generally crap. I use a specific strength training app because it gives good videos on the watch.
Went diving last vacation and my Ultra 2 turned into an excellent dive computer (after paying $10 for one month of the corresponding app). The equivalent watch from Garmin is much more expensive.
But the "cheaper models" are still more expensive than what is Apple's Top Model. Which excels at my main usage scenario (being a smartwatch) and also superbly supports various secondary activities (like diving).
And, by the way, having to decide from all those models is not exactly a selling point. I am not primarily a diver, a skier, a runner, a hiker or a biker - but I occasionally do all of those.
With superb integration in the Apple ecosystem, apps for everything and cheaper prices for top hardware, Apple watch is the perfect default choice. It's Garmin's burden to convince me to switch and they are not succeeding.
While I get the concerns about battery life, like most things in tech it's about weighing different tradeoffs against each other. Battery life, ecosystem, quality of sensors, app availability, resale value, etc.
I already have daily habits around charging, so that doesn't bother me, and if I'm traveling I can either bring a charger or put the watch in low power mode where it lasts a surprisingly long time.
My Apple watch purchase was basically for one feature. Fall detection, and automatic 911 calling. I bought the watch when I had a close call with a car while riding my bike to work, and wanted to make sure in case of an accident, I'd at least probably die in the ambulance and not on the side of the road :)
Let me get this straight: your evening routine has no margin for 10 minute parallelizable tasks, yet you’re commenting sarcastically about supposed chores in my life? In order to defend doing the same but every 3 days instead?
The Whoop band has an elegant solution. They provide you with a small (~30x30mm) power bank that you can slide onto the band to charge. The band stays on your wrist. When done, you just slide off the power bank and charge it again.
At this point, it’s pretty clear Apple targets a specific battery life (18 hours) and builds the techs around that. As a result, I don’t think we will get an improvement in that area anytime soon.
However, it does look like they improved the charging story—something like 80% in 30 minutes? Not bad.
I've thought about this. How much more battery life would they have to build in for it to be noticeably better?
When I charge my watch at the end of the day, I usually have plenty to spare, but not always enough to make it through to the morning (especially if I tracked an exercise). Even if a new watch got 24hrs of battery life, I would still have to charge it at night so I wouldn't really matter. I'd guess that 18hrs it a balance that keeps people content and gives Apple's engineers enough room to fit in all the features they want.
Of course, I would love to be able to track a long exercise or a 10-hour hike...but there's a different price tier for that.
Three days would be solid, that would get me mid day Friday to mid day Monday. Sleep data is a high priority for me and it's go time pretty much from when I open my eyes (little kids) so I wear the watch pretty much 24h/day. On desk work days I charge there (not much activity to miss) but over the weekend or if I'm traveling that gets disrupted.
For me I need a routine. Charging daily works well for me, else I would want 7 days. I think Apple targeting super quick charging really alleviates the issue for me all together. I’m on an old series 4, and instantly preordered this one. I’m sure it is gonna feel like a whole new level of luxury compared to what I was already pretty happy with.
I want to put that thing on in the morning on a Friday, get a text message from a friend about some crazy party of weekend event and be able to attend that to make it home Sunday night to get ready for work on Monday.
Yep they do this for all their platforms, set a battery target based on ~90%tile daily usage of particular form factor (e.g. 18hr watch/iphone, 10-12hr macbook/ipad) and then let ID & chip teams do whatever they want to hit that. The value add of every additional minute/hour of battery life drops off from there because daily loops for charging are realistically what everyone will do, and there's more value add in other places like making things thinner, faster, or do something new.
Got Garmin Fenix, use mainly for the sports features. Lasts a week on a single charge including several activities with GPS usage. Can’t imagine having another device to charge daily.
This. I like my apple watch for doing mainly two things; tracking workouts and being a silent alarm clock that lives on my wrist. The <2 day battery life is really becoming annoying, as I have to remember to put it on the charger for at least ~1 hour a day or it won't have enough juice to wake me up in the morning.
Also, it boggles my mind but the alarms/haptics in my S8 seem weirdly unreliable. Like 10% of the time my alarms just decide not to vibrate and I don't wake up. Tons of people have this problem and it seems to have something to do with the cover to mute gesture, but disabling it in settings doesn't fix the issue.
For those two reasons I'm strongly considering ditching my apple watch and grabbing a garmin instead. Just trying to decide if the move outside of the ecosystem is worth it and which model to buy.
That's just the use case I have for my cheapo Xiaomi SmartBand for ~30 USD and I charge about every 2 weeks for this
If you're willing to live with not enabling raise to wake, AoD and Sleep Tracking, you might be able to pull off like 20+ days of battery life, not that I would want to, I like it not dropping that far so I haven't tested it fully
I'm not aware of how well do Xiaomi's Bands play with iOS, but might be worth a shot, it's a cheap enough option
If only Garmin had an unlocked LTE watch, it would be perfect. I had been eyeing the Garmin Instinct Solar, with "infinite" battery and Garmin Pay, but to be able to leave my phone home I'd need LTE
I've got the instinct and couldn't be happier with it. Definitely going to be rebuying/upgrading to whatever is next if it ever bites the dust, which it probably won't for a long time since it's also rugged.
Without any activity tracking it lasts ~40 days on a charge, and charges in about an hour. If you live somewhere sunny like I do, even with tracking it lasts practically forever cause of the solar panel.
The flashlight also seemed like a gimmick at first but it's surprised me in how often I reach for it
I don't care about the usual smartwatch crap. I already have a phone, not gonna be sending messages on my watch, but I guess that can be a bummer if you care about it.
Fwiw, Garmin has their inreach platform, and their watches can talk to their transceivers. So not LTE, and not second device free, but an inreach is about the size of a zippo and has global satellite coverage
> Can’t imagine having another device to charge daily.
This is precisely why I stopped using my Garmin. I did really like it and used it when I was running daily. But when I went on long hikes (8+ miles), I often ran out of battery. The watch charged very fast, but I got sick of having to remember to charge it daily if I wanted to track an activity.
I now wear my Fossil ('dumb'?) watch daily. After maybe five years, I've replaced the battery once. It's so much nicer than a daily recharge.
I have a garmin enduro 2 that I got for under $500 with some discounts. When tracking activities with GPS it lasts for over 100 hours, closer to 150 if you’re benefiting from some solar charging. In normal smartwatch mode it gets up to 40 days.
I’ll randomly once a month remember to charge it and that’s enough. I’ve never had the battery dip below 27 days remaining.
My old garmin was a forerunner 945 and I could about two days of hiking in on a charge, maybe more with battery-saving stuff on, but this is a whole different ballpark now.
The Apple watch ultra, while expensive, at least has 1.5 to 2 day battery life, which has completely eliminated the issue of charging midday that I used to run into if using gps or fitness tracking for more than a few hours.
maybe, though I think it's possible there are GPS improvements and other performance improvements under the hood. I'm not sure, and I agree it's quite expensive. It was a gift, though one I happen to irrationally love and it would have been worth it for me if I had bought it.
Go garmin. I have a vivoactive 5, it has 11 days of battery and loads of stats. I love it. My wife liked mine so much she dumped her Fitbit and now has the same watch. It's great.
Garmin's own product webpage highlights the biggest problem with Garmin.[0] They have too many options, with very little distinguishing features. Instead of making hardware to justify the number of models, they cripple watches in various ways using software.
For example, on my Vivoactive 4, recording a "Hike" activity is impossible. Instead, I have to record all my hikes as "Walks".
They should trim their offerings down to fewer than 10 models instead of the 28 currently listed.
Vivoactive doesn't have the best heart tracking, especially compared to Apple watches which are the gold standard for it. Someone who can afford an Apple watch should probably go for Garmin Venu 3. Same hybrid model benefits with a better sensor.
I follow The Quantified Scientist on YouTube and he's reviewed both I believe. I think the Vivoactive has the older HR sensor and that's why it performed a bit worse in that category.
Battery life is the main thing that made me upgrade to the Ultra model. It has double the battery which gets it to the point I don’t have to worry about battery.
FWIW: My first gen Ultra can go a couple days without a charge pretty easily, but I did have issues with my previous Apple watches. If battery life is the issue, you might do better off going with the Ultra...
went back to a casio f91w.
battery last 7 years, can buy 200 for the price of one apple watch se and no privacy issue. Just get a polar h10 to monitor sport activity and honestly it's as good or better, having to charge it everyday is painfull.
Yes! Agonizing that 10 years in and the battery still can't get you through more than one day. My pebble from 2013 was a much more practical and useable device than any Apple watch I've owned over the last decade.
RE charging cycles, my five year old Series 5 only just dipped under 80% this year so considering the required charging frequency they do pretty well in terms of battery lifetime.
I wish they would let us customize low power mode and other features to tailor battery life. I'd trade battery life for less frequent heart rate readings, for example.
Apple is run by a bunch of well-past-middle-age executives who have zero incentive to do anything but coast to the finish line. The sleep apnea feature makes no sense for a product that is charging on my nightstand every night because of it's shitty battery life. Apple has gotten too fat.
